Three tips for effective, efficient quality assurance

I hope by now I’ve convinced you of the benefits of quality assurance – although I appreciate that I may not have convinced you that QA is a fun task!

Either way, accepting that you need to do it is one thing; knowing how to do it effectively and efficiently is another. Here are my simple tips for doing just that.

1. Give it a fresh look. I’m sure we’ve all written things, reviewed them thoroughly, and then noticed a mistake once it’s too late. In fact, I’d probably bet money on there being at least one error in at least one of these posts on QA. It’s all too easy to miss mistakes or imperfections in your own work, largely because you know it too well. The best solution to this is to get someone else to QA your work after you’ve reviewed it yourself. But if a fresh pair of eyes isn’t available, put the work aside (ideally for a day or two, but at least for a few hours) or transfer it into a new format. When you come back to it, you’ll be more likely to see the detail, rather than seeing what you know you wrote.
2. Consider TVF in turn. My experience is that it’s not possible to review everything at once. You can’t pay full attention to the spelling and grammar if you’re also trying to review the visual details. Likewise, if you’re focusing on trying to break interactions and check functionality, you’ll struggle to pay attention to the flow of content and the sense of the narrative. So I think it’s really worth doing at least two separate QA reviews: one to look at the textual element and the overall sense, and another to look at the visuals and functionality. It might sound laborious, but doing two or three QAs right first time is preferable to doing multiple iterations because your client picks up on mistakes you missed first time around.
3. Allow plenty of time. How long would you allow to QA a 60-minute e-learning course? There’s no right answer here, obviously, but my gut feeling is that around three hours would be right (if not a little longer). This allows enough time to review all three elements in detail, to flick backwards and forwards between screens as required to check consistency, and to log clear and specific details of all the bugs and issues found. This last point is vitally important, whether you or someone else will be making the changes – it’ll help speed up the turnaround of the next iteration without misinterpretation or error, and it also provides you with a detailed audit trail of changes requested.

My final two tips would be practise and spread the word! Next time you have a document to QA, make a conscious decision to set aside plenty of time to do it properly. Even better, ask someone else to set some time aside to QA it as well – and offer to do the same for them. By insisting on high standards and integrity in your own QA process, you’ll help develop a wider QA culture – and that can only be a good thing.

What you should look for when doing quality assurance

Last week I set out the benefits of QA. But what does ‘QA’ mean?

To many people, it is synonymous with ‘proof-reading’, but that’s a very simplistic view. QA stands for quality assurance, and that means quality in every respect.

Let’s think about some non-learning examples.

If you were QA-ing a newspaper article, the review would of course cover spelling and grammar. But it would also cover factual accuracy, tone of voice, sources for quotations and so on. You’d probably want to check the headline appropriately reflected the thrust of the article, and that any accompanying photographs made sense with the story.

If you were QA-ing a dining table, however, there’s no proof-reading required. Instead, you’d probably check that the wood was in good condition, that the dimensions of the table top are suitable for the given number of people, that the four table legs were all the same height, and that everything was screwed together securely.

So, when you’re QA-ing an e-learning course, what are you looking for? It depends a little on the stage of the process: what you check at storyboarding stage will be slightly different from what you check once it’s built. But overall I think there are three categories of things you should check during an e-learning QA.

• Textual: This covers spelling, punctuation and grammar, of course. But it also covers accuracy – are all the facts and figures correct? Obviously the subject matter expert will need to check this too, but you should pick up any contradictions or any statistics that don’t add up, for example. Your textual QA should also cover the tone of voice – is it appropriate and is it adopted throughout the course? This is particularly important if more than one person has been involved in storyboarding. Finally, consistency: someone once told me consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative, but I maintain it’s important. Some learners might not notice inconsistent writing, but some will and it disrupts the flow and experience. Is the writing consistently UK or US English spelling? Are capital letters used consistently? Are bullet points punctuated consistently?
• Visual: This covers the layout, which should be user-friendly and clear, as well as more detailed visual considerations. Check every text box to make sure that no words or letters have been cut off, check that special characters are appearing properly, and check that different elements on screen are aligned appropriately and (yes, again) consistently. Check that all images are of a high enough resolution, that they support the message on that screen, and that any animations or diagrams are easy to understand. And, of course, check that the visual design throughout is in line with any branding guidelines.
• Functional: This covers how the course works. You should be checking that all interactive elements are easy to use and smooth – disjointed or stilted activities aren’t user-friendly. You should also make sure that all interactions have been translated correctly from the storyboard – that right and wrong answers are designated correctly, for example – and that any URLs launch the expected page. Finally, if accessibility is a requirement, this needs checking too, as does the interaction between the course and any system it needs to be hosted on or interact with.

So which of these three areas is most important when carrying out a QA?

That’s a trick question, of course: none of them is more important than the others. Every learner will focus in on different things so you can’t afford to have mistakes in any area – your QA needs to give each element equal attention.

Next up, I’ll share my tips for carrying out a QA of the three elements mentioned above in the most effective, time-efficient way.

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Six irresistible benefits of real quality assurance

Some people hate quality assurance. They enjoy the creative stages of a project, when they can map out storyboards or design ideas and turn policy-speak into friendly, accessible language. They don’t enjoy having to review that friendly, accessible language for typos.

I have to confess though – and I’m sure this won’t surprise anyone who knows me even a little bit – that I do enjoy QA.

There’s definitely an editor inside me. I like QA-ing other people’s work most (because it’s much easier and more effective when you’re objective and not close to the content) but I’m pretty happy QA-ing my own work too, when I need to.

Regardless of whether or not you enjoy QA, however, it’s important and something that needs to be done. What’s more, it needs to be done properly – giving something a cursory once-over and ticking the QA box isn’t enough.

A thorough and reliable QA process will eliminate all avoidable errors or bugs before you send something out to stakeholders. This means that they can focus on content and design reviews and it’ll take fewer iterations to get to sign-off point. It also means you can rest assured that any rework required will be about improving and enhancing content and design, rather than fixing mistakes you missed the first time around.

Aside from the financial benefits, giving QA the attention it deserves helps you deliver high quality deliverables, which means happy customers who trust you. You’ll earn a reputation for integrity and excellence (either as an organisation or as an individual (and both matter)) and, because happy customers talk, you’ll benefit from recommendations.

There’s an internal benefit as well: a focus on QA helps to develop a culture of continuous improvement. Colleagues will help each other develop, challenging things and preventing complacency setting in and leading to carelessness. In my experience, high standards are infectious – if one or two members of the team set the right example and pick up even the littlest things, these good habits will spread and you’ll develop a true QA culture.

So I see six key benefits of a thorough and effective QA process and culture:

• You’ll achieve sign-off more quickly.
• You’ll reduce the time and money spent on rework.
• You’ll build trust and respect.
• You’ll earn a reputation for excellence.
• You’ll win word-of-mouth business.
• You’ll nuture ongoing improvement.

What’s not to like?

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Let’s get back to basics: why we should write more like we speak

It’s been a while since I wrote about language and tone of voice. But anyone who knows me well knows that this is a pet subject of mine.

I love words, and I love writing.

Talking, less so – but I do believe in taking inspiration from talking when writing.

Academia instills a different mindset, certainly in my experience, and so my undergraduate essays were formal in register and complex in sentence structure: that’s what was (rightly or wrongly) expected. But since entering the world of business communications, I’ve been converted. I now think that most situations call for a back to basics approach to writing.

I think it’s absolutely right that school teachers encourage pupils to find more interesting and descriptive replacements for ‘nice’ and ‘said’ and ‘get’. It builds vocabulary and encourages an appreciation for (if not necessarily a love of) creative writing. But while I’m all for e-learning scripting to be approached more like a creative writing exercise (within reason), I tend to think that in many – if not most – cases, those plain and simple words we were trained out of as children are just right for the job.

That’s why I was really interested by the results of a study by language consultancy The Writer. My impression is that this wasn’t a particularly extensive study (you can read more about how and where they gathered these results in their original blog post) but it’s interesting nonetheless. Essentially, the study supports The Writer’s belief that there are some words we use in written communication that just don’t crop up in speech. They compiled a short list of words that are found many more times in the written word than in the spoken word, and their counterparts that are much more commonly used in spoken English. Words like ‘purchase’, ‘obtain’ and ‘receive’ are replaced by ‘buy’ or ‘get’ in speech, for example.

What’s particularly interesting is that, as far as I can tell from The Writer’s summary of the study, this research is not based on any particular type of writing or speaking: it reflects global usage (global in the sense of genre, rather than geography). There’s no second list of the words most commonly used in spoken business situations, for example. This means that ‘get’ is used by speakers in situations ranging from playground chit-chat to board room presentations, and from dinner party conversations to politicans’ speeches. And if it’s good enough for world leaders, it’s good enough for learners.

So let’s get back to basics when writing for e-learning and close that vast, unnecessary divide between the way we talk and the way we write.

Image: sheelamohan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

10 ways to improve learner experience: webinar summary

Last week I posted some reflections on innovation, prompted by an interesting LSG webinar presented by James Cory-Wright from Brightwave.

James illustrated 10 examples of incremental innovation (or ‘butterfly moments’) in e-learning, which I think are well worth sharing.

So here’s a quick summary:

1. Reflect your users. Take the time to create a look and feel that aligns with what they know and that resonates with what they value.
2. Respect your users. Credit them with the ability to find their own way round a course or set of resources and step away from the enforced linear path model.
3. Re-purpose successful formulas (with a twist). Find something that works and tweak it to keep it fresh, for example by modelling your next course on a tried-and-tested website.
4. Resources not courses. Provide users with different entry points into a range of mixed-media resources, whether that’s by format, story, character or topic.
5. Re-use best practice by the experts. There’s no shame in emulating success and learning from the masters – if someone has a idea which has worked well, use that as a starting point.
6. Re-invent the e-learning screen. Even if you can’t stretch to video or 3D modelling, you can redefine traditional screens by experimenting with images, text, colour and layout.
7. Re-purpose good stuff that inspires you. Pull elements from websites, adverts, films or games that you love and see how you can incorporate them into your e-learning design.
8. (Re-)evolve. Rather than always starting from scratch, consciously consider what you’ve already done and how you could build upon it and evolve it into something one level up.
9. Remember what the user needs from your design. Keep the WIIFM agenda at the front of your mind and design e-learning that will work for users in a range of contexts and situations.
10. Repeat the key messages – but always with a twist. Use poster or email campaigns, takeaways, viral videos or any other media you can think of to help people remember what you need them to remember.

You can see a recording of the full webinar (which includes real examples of all the above in practice) or download James’ slides on the LSG website, and he has also picked up on some of the key themes raised by the webinar audience on the Brightwave blog.

Image: Danilo Rizzuti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net